I have several partitions with several distro's and XP.

XP is on /dev/hda1 (installation is from a ghosted image of an entire disk installation of XP that was placed lock stock and match on /dev/hda1): with BootMagic or grub or lilo, no problem with XP rewriting MBR

Linux distro's, lilo or grub always placed in root parition (leave mbr untouched)

For the third time with different releases of the business card and netinst, choosing grub and placing it in the root partition seems to be the bestest until i boot into windows and take a look at partition magic-->hda1 bad after a bunch of trying to fixits.

booting into a linux distro and and fdisk -l a bit later reveals that the drive geometry had in fact changed to an unrealistic value (head,sectors).


What's going on?
May try lilo and update, been doing a lil reading.

Would like to use grub on the installation that's devoid of X-Window for use with developing kernels. Since i use make-kpkg instead of the traditional make, make modules, make modules install ... (or whatever, cause i havent in a while) grub is the ideal for checking out new kernel features.

Please Help! Is it something im doing or is it because GRUB is alpha quality software? (It was as of mid 2003 as I checked their site)

Not a but as heck about debian

ill keep and hopefully not get and end in s.

im a two year
Thanks in advance

I've been using grub for about 2 years without problems, originally with RedHat 9 until about a month ago when I replaced that with Debian Sarge on my laptop, and with RedHat9, Gentoo, and Mandrake 10 on desktops. No trouble with grub; a couple of times I even (deliberately) deleted the linux partitions where the boot stage 2 files were installed but was still able to boot my windows partition using the grub command line from a grub floppy.

I always install grub in the mbr. Maybe your problems occur because you're installing stage 1 on the linux partition.